Coinbase Reacts to IRS’ John Doe Summons

The conflict of interests between the governments and Bitcoin sector is well known. The increasing adoption of decentralized, peer to peer digital currency has got the governments worrying about the potential loss of control over their respective nations’ monetary policies. The government organizations are trying to compensate for their insecurities by strong-arming the cryptocurrency platforms. The US Government, through IRS, seems to have made one such attempt against Coinbase recently.

The US government agencies are known to ask tech companies to provide private information belonging to their customers on a regular basis. As the government blatantly violates the right to privacy of millions of citizens behind their backs, some of the companies put up a fight to protect their customers’ interests. In the case of Coinbase, the IRS has issued a “John Doe” summons to the company, asking it to turn over all records of transactions on the platform during the period of 2013 and 2015. The summons, according to reports will require the company to provide details of all user profiles, history of changes made to these profiles since they were created, complete user preferences, security settings and history of activity including transactions, devices